Talking with Women About War

What do women have to do with war? That question has, in one way or the other, been asked a great deal lately. There’s the question of women soldiers going into combat (Andrew Sullivan got a discussion going on that) and of women as victims of sexual violence in war zones. The Nobel committee posed it in a backward way, by giving a prize that indicated it thought women had something particular to do with war zones.

I got a chance to ask more questions related to that subject on Wednesday, when I moderated a panel of women war correspondents at an event sponsored by the New America Foundation and DoubleX, at New America’s New York office. As a moderator, I was lucky: the four panelists, Kate Brooks, a photographer; Eliza Griswold and Elizabeth Rubin, who are writers; and Tresha Mabile, a documentary filmmaker, were all brilliant and insightful and had very good stories to tell. There was also a slide show of images from Brooks’s new book, “In the Light of Darkness” (see Photo Booth for more), and a clip from “Talibanistan,” a film Mabile made for National Geographic. In it, you could see her walking into a mine field.

None of the women thought that their work was overly defined by their gender, or, at least, gender didn’t stop them. In some places, they could go through doors in a village that the men they worked with couldn’t. But we also talked about risk, and the choices each made, good and bad: one of the worst prospects they saw, which each of them thought about a great deal, was that they would judge only the risk to themselves, and not to the locals that they worked with or encountered. That is not only a women’s dilemma, of course; it is very much an American one. Women and men alike can leave others behind when they go to war—and be left—and take risks whose outlines they can only begin to make out.

Photograph by Kate Brooks.

Amy Davidson Sorkin, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a regular contributor to Comment for the magazine and writes a Web column in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.